Tag: Clonmacnoise

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re fated? That things, despite your best intentions, seem doomed to go wrong?

So it was when my parents and I decided to take ourselves off to Ireland, the land of my maternal forefathers, for a lovely week’s holiday. The aim was to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday (April) as well as my twin brother and my 50th birthday (August) in the month of my mam’s birthday (June), which, being in the middle of the two, meant that no one was left out. Apart from my brother, that is, who lives in Australia and so couldn’t make it. But the thought was there.

So the plan was to fly in to Dublin, pick up our hire car and hot tail it over to Athlone, which is roughly half way between the Emerald Isle’s capital city on the east coast and its cultural hub on the west side, Galway. And thus began one of the central themes of our holiday – that of getting lost.

The streets of Galway

While everything was quite stress-free as long as we stayed on the straight and narrow of the country-spanning M6 motorway, it was getting to our final destination that flummoxed us each time – satnav notwithstanding. In Athlone, after going up and down the same stretch of road several times and ending up in a farmyard anxiously eyeing an approaching dairy herd, we finally gave in and called our hosts at a local B&B who came and rescued us in their SUV.

To make matters worse, when driving out to dinner at the excellent Hodson Bay Hotel on the shores of the lovely Lough Ree that very evening, we somehow took a wrong turn. Twenty-two whole kilometres up the motorway later, we finally found a slip road and were able to go back the way we came. Amazingly, we made our booking a mere 30 minutes late.

But it was a similar story when arriving in Galway the next day. On trying to find the apart-hotel close to the town centre that we’d opted for as a respite from the usual strictures of hotel life, we ended driving round in endless circles getting increasingly desperate as the satnav took us near – and yet so far.

So again, we got on the phone, only to discover we’d actually been driving fruitlessly up and down and around about the road directly behind our intended destination. But that’s what happens when you’re naïve enough to assume that signage will be visible from the main thoroughfare rather than the pretty, little canal on the other side. So we had nobody to blame but ourselves. Obviously.

Even in Dublin though, where you wouldn’t think we could go too far wrong, we still managed to miss our end point – although in mitigation, we were given the name of the main road rather than the street leading off it, which was in fact our true destination.

Sensory shennanigans

But as if such transporting delights weren’t enough, it also seemed to be a week of things going wrong apropos our sensory organs. I started the ball rolling by leaving my steroid eye drops at home, which in the wake of my second cataract operation – despite being 20 to 30 years too young – were possibly the most important thing not to forget when packing.

But after ripping my luggage apart after finally arriving at our B&B in Athlone, I discovered their unexpected disappearance – or as it turned out, my absent-mindedness. And this, despite having constructed a scenario in my head where I distinctly remembered having put them in my handbag. Which meant, of course, that they must have magically transported themselves back home to my kitchen just to annoy me.

So the planned guided tour around the stunning, ruined monastery of Clonmacnoise on the banks of the River Shannon had to wait for another day. Instead we spent the morning in a pharmacy in downtown Athlone traversing our way around the system so that I could be prescribed some more – with it must be said the aid of the sweetest, most helpful pharmacist that ever walked the earth. I can’t imagine people going out of their way quite so much at home, but I wasn’t half grateful.

Clonmacnoise monastery, near Athlone

Next on the list was my dad, who after quietly enjoying a respite from seemingly endless female chatter, actually discovered that the batteries in his hearing aids had run down – although it wasn’t anything that a hasty trip to the not entirely obvious destination of optician SpecSavers couldn’t sort out.

Not to be outdone, meanwhile, my mam managed to break off a sizeable chunk of back filling after crunching down particularly vigorously on a Murray Mint on the way to Galway. So that accounted for another morning of our precious holiday as she, in turn, availed herself of the facilities.

Which at least gave us a respite indoors from the driving rain that had pursued us from the moment we set foot in the place, I suppose. A particularly poignant situation as such intemperate weather had sadly followed hot on the heels of a two-week heat wave.

But there were lots of pluses too. The Irish people we met were as friendly and convivial as ever. The country was as beautiful and varied as I remembered it. And its history was just as poignant and affecting now as it’s always been, especially in this centennial year of the Easter Rising, a pivotal moment in Ireland finally managing to win independence from England/Britain after 800 years of oppression.

So I guess the moral of this particular little tale is that, even in what seem to be the most difficult of times, things can, and very often do, turn out just fine in the end.